Category: Baking and Pastry

When my sister and I were growing up our father worked out of town a lot. We only got to see him a couple times a year usually but when we did it was always a special treat. One of my fondest memories growing up was one morning waking up to the smell of some kind of corn bread wafting through the house. I came downstairs and my dad had made something called Johnny Cake for breakfast. What? Cake for breakfast? I was sold.

Now on some of those rare mornings I have time I throw together this simple recipe and then smother it with butter and maple syrup for an amazing breakfast treat.

If you ever feel like something other than pancakes and waffles definitely try this recipe out, eat it warm, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

2 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

2 tbsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 cups yellow cornmeal

4 eggs

2 cups milk

1 cup oil

Sift all the dry ingredients together, make a well in the centre. Blend all the wet ingredients together in a separate bowl and then add to the dry ingredients. Fold together only until clear. Put into greased 13×9 inch pan and bake for about 25 minutes at 425F. You could also add cheese, sweet corn, or even sausage if you so please.

Serve warm with pure maple syrup and some butter and you have cake for breakfast!

Probably one of the best cakes I have ever tasted in my life. very light and fluffy, not such a sweet cake where it is overpowering yet still great to eat as any dessert. what I find pretty awesome about this cake is how you can actually eat it plain. like, out of the oven or cooled down plain. Even though in the recipe it says it goes best with apricot jam after it is not so hot, (not a fan) it still taste great in my opinion.

What made me really want to make this cake was because I have always liked food culture in Japan, and Tend to read about alot of little snacks and desserts that are popular there. Turns out that one the the most popular treats is this wonderful goodness, the cheese cake. I recommend this to everyone who loves desserts that are light and not too strong in sweetness.

Here is my Final baked cake and what it turned out to be

Definitely does not look like the one that is like the recipe looks like. how ever the taste is still there. still light and fluffy and not too sweet. Some mistakes happen. how ever I will most likely make this cake many more times this month in march because its just that good.

I love all aspects of baking, however bread is definitely not my strong suit. But when I started thinking about competing in the Chef’s Hat competition, I knew I wanted to create something all on my own. It was a perfect opportunity to challenge my bread making ability and come up with a formula of my own, which I had never done before.

My inspiration for doing a chocolate bread came from this reddit post I saw a few months ago. I hadn’t even thought of chocolate in a bread dough before this! What a great, unique idea that contains one of my favourite ingredients – chocolate. The reddit user who posted their bread used this recipe, which contains dried fruit and walnuts.

Turns out chocolate sourdough hasn’t been done very often, because my internet surfing for recipes to compare with was pretty dry. Most recipes have chocolate chips and dried fruit as inclusions, but I wanted the impactful, deep dark coloured loaf like the “sourdough noir.” There was one recipe that seemed to be the front runner – Chocolate cherry loaf. Chef James Bartlett of Metropolitan bakery in Philadelphia specializes in this bread, and I managed to find a few videos of his makeup process. My friend Halsey found me a recipe for a chocolate cherry bread just like it, so I had a good base to start creating my formula from.

Instead of cherries, I wanted to have one of my favourite flavour combinations – chocolate and hazelnuts. In our NAIT formula books there is a recipe for “Rustic Hazelnut Sourdough (#52),” so I took that one and compared it side by side to the chocolate cherry loaf formula. Here are my first set of notes comparing the 2:

I knew I had to play around with the yeast levels and hydration to get the right balance, so I started with 65% hydration and 1% yeast in addition to my sourdough starter. I also decided to cold brew espresso into my water for the bread overnight since espresso is a natural flavour enhancer to chocolate. As for procedure, I did an autolyse method and retarded the dough overnight. Here is the first formula and procedure:

Everything went as planned for the first go round…except I forgot to add the yeast. The levain alone did not do well overnight in the fridge, and the dough temperature was very low. The bread smelled amazing, however it was way too dense. I also got feedback that the amount of chocolate chips was a little high. A disappointing first attempt, but not a complete failure. Back to the books!

I did two more tests, keeping everything constant except for the hydration, levain amount and chocolate chip amount. I reduced the chocolate chips by 10% for both loaves, and followed the same procedure. This time I actually added the yeast though, and did not retard overnight.

Much better. The chocolate chip amount was just right, and yeast definitely helped a lot. I would have liked to retard overnight for that nice bubbly skin and better flavour development, but overall I was pleased. The formula I decided to go with was test #2, with 70% hydration and 65% levain. I ended up using that formula for our final practical assessment:

They weren’t the prettiest loaves, but they did turn out pretty good. I did not retard them overnight, and in the interest of time I ended up doing a hot brewed espresso instead of a cold brew which actually made the bread quite sour compared to the previous attempts. The sourness balanced pretty well, but I found that it was less of a chocolate enhancer and more of a hazelnut suppressor.

I still have some tweaks to do until it’s perfect, but I like the flavour of it and overall I think I achieved my goal. This bread tastes and smells amazing when toasted with a bit of butter. The Chef’s Hat competition is soon, and I intend on using test #2 with cold brew espresso and retarding overnight. Ask me later how it turns out!

This time I tried my hand at a breakfast mug cake recipe. After making the recipe and tasting it I realized that the cake was dense and thick. It had a gritty and bland taste to it so instead of comparing this recipe I decided to adjust the formula and try to make the mug cake again. This time instead of one tablespoons of syrup I used two. This mug cake wasn’t much better than the original. The cake was still to dense and grainy. So the next time I choose to use three tablespoons of milk and I also kept the two tablespoon of syrup to the flavor to the pancake. This time the Cake turned out lighter and fluffy and soaked up the syrup that was poured on top.

These adorable little Italian cookies were a childhood favorite of mine, so I’m going to attempt to make some with a chocolatey twist, based on a recipe from this book:

Cute, huh? Now, I’m not sure if this book is available in Canada, considering that this is a translated copy that I bought in Italy, so I’ll try to provide pictures along the way.

1 1/4 cups (165 g) all-purpose flour

1/3 cup (75 g) confectioners sugar

1/4 cup (25 g) cocoa powder

1/2 scant cup (100 g) unsalted butter

1 egg

Vanilla powder (pinch)

Salt (pinch)

So, what exactly is vanilla powder? When I first got this book, I had no idea, but it it’s used in almost every recipe. Because the book was originally written in Italian, I was a little worried that it wasn’t available in Canada. I asked my Nonna about it, and instead of just telling me, she went to the trouble of actually buying me some! Anyway, vanilla powder (front row, on the right), as you probably guessed, is a substitute for vanilla extract that is mixed in with the dry ingredients. It must only be used in small amounts, as the flavor is much stronger. I wish I knew the conversion rate, but unfortunately I haven’t experimented with it enough to know.